September 14, 2010

Easy/Fast Navigation with aliases in profiles

Because I am a lazy guy who wants to do everything fast I really like to have aliases in user profiles. When I login on a box different version of Oracle Homes and multiple ORacle databases on the same machine I feel naked without aliases. I am a guy who wants to tail alert log/any related log while I am doing something and not having an alias for tailing not just slows me down it also makes me really annoyed in 5 seconds time. At current job I suffered for the first week and I immediately requested to have a “standard” profile and got acception from my manager and I wrote/modified the one below. Most of the ideas are taken from perfect blog entry of John Hallas, The use of functions in a .profile file . I needed to modify because we have 10G databases with 11GR2 GI for ASM and some more modifications for RAC. (Probably most of you already realized that I am good with modifying a code but rubbish with my own, old habit from university never liked programming and needed to pass some classes:))

Here are the two functions I added to the profiles. First one (setsid) sets env settings of the database listed in /etc/oratab, second one (showsid) shows the aliases you can use after you call setsid. Couple of things to bear in mind, setsid assumes that you have $ORACLE_BASE which is hardcoded /u01/app/oracle in the script and it also assumes that you use ORACLE_SID for alert log directories. oradiag and ldiag aliases are default set because we use 11G diag home on all the boxes. You may also need to check ora_version variable it may not suit to your settings. (OFA is needed for everything run without modification)

Thanks for sharing the links ,currently I do not have anything on windows but pearl looks definitely better than having different file types for different os. And the additional options for managing the databases are all good. it is basically a compact framework of what I was doing with multiple scripts.